BEYOND BARCELONA

I’m obsessed with old houses and hotels. OBSESSED. I have wasted more hours than I care to admit going online and looking at hotel rooms and villas. I want to live in a hotel (an upscale one, of course) but I think that’s not likely. Instead, I look at pictures of them and, on occasion, book one or rent a gorgeous villa. I’ve also found that pictures can be deceiving and have had some real disasters, like in Italy two years ago when the house surrounded by dog eating creatures with fangs that drooled blood and we left immediately.

But this time, using VRBO, I found paradise. Paradise for practically nothing. Seriously. It is so cheap. No shitbag chain hotel we stayed in two years ago on the road was a cheap as this.

The place was built in the 12th century and absolutely beyond belief. Stone walls, fantastic tiles and ceramic work. Each room has its own bathroom and balcony with views of the lower Pyrenees. The only sound is the wind. It’s terrifyingly quiet. It’s hard to believe there is a world outside these walls except that when we encounter people they immediately see our anti-Trump buttons and engage us. One mother told her that when Trump coms on tv her little boy, three years old, comments “mommy, that’s a very bad man.”

Yesterday was one of those days where you set up with a specific plan and EVERYTHING goes wrong. We headed to Girona, which is gorgeous ancient walled city and with its annual flower festival ready to kick. We all wanted to see the historic Jewish quarter. I took my GPS loaded with a SIM card so we could find it. Not only did the damn thing send us up to the very top of Girona, climbing hundreds and hundreds of steps, the bloody thing wasn’t there. The restaurant I’d made reservations at a month ago kept calling to see where we were. But we couldn’t find for the life of us find it no matter how many people we asked. And that fucking GPS was WORTHLESS!! Then, on top of everything else, we lost the car. We wondered the streets for over an hour trying to find our parking lot. It was pathetic. We were the perfect idiot American tourists. Couldn’t speak the language, didn’t note where we parked, couldn’t read the map because of the all the intertwining streets.

Girona is absolutely beautiful, the parts we saw on foot, which was extensive. We’re supposed to go back again today. Let’s hope for better results.

It’s interesting because I find it much easier to communicate in Italy, although we don’t speak Italian, than here, which surprises me. I don’t know why. It’s my own stereotyping, I guess.

But I did take some nice pics. Take a look.

They are sooo happy roaming the property, although Tootsie managed to find a drain pipe that lead to the outside “danger” and we had to go off in search of her and ultimately, plug the getaway spot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More flower prep as the town readies itself